After 12 years of reporting on Oahu’s traffic, Danielle Tucker can read the roads the way a wayfinder can read the seas.
The wall in front of her looks like mission control in a movie. Twenty screens display live feeds from traffic cameras all over the island. The amount of visual information is overwhelming, but Tucker senses something.
“I’m looking at the H1-H2 merge, and the traffic is strange. Willy, can we turn the camera left?”
The camera moves, and sure enough, she spots a stall, though it’s nearly impossible to see the black truck in the dark.
“I depend on a sense of the flow. I look for patterns and anomalies,” she explains.
Tucker is the last reporter left at the City and County of Honolulu Traffic Management Center. Several stations used to have reporters there during rush hour, but now it’s just her and the guys from the city Department of Transportation Services. When she’s on vacation, the disc jockeys at the various Summit Media stations for which she reports cover as best they can from the studio. She has no understudy or sub. When she’s sick, she still comes to work, though she rarely gets sick.
Tucker has her cellphone on the desk in front of her and a landline to the right. Sometimes she is using both at the same time, one to call the Fire Department and the other to check with police. There are also two small monitors on her desk, one tuned to Hawaii News Now and the other, a closer view of the traffic cameras. She can punch in numbers on a keypad and call up any of the more than 300 traffic cameras on the island. She has most of the camera numbers memorized. She reports live alternately to KINE and KRTR every five minutes, to KCCN and Hawaii News Now on their own schedules, and also records reports for Power 104.3 and Pinoy Power Filipino radio station. She tweets, posts to Facebook and checks various traffic sites while watching the live traffic cameras. She doesn’t work with notes. Everything is in her head. It’s like she’s landing airplanes at JFK — she has to be aware of so many things and react so quickly. During a live traffic report, she’s describing exactly what’s happening that moment on dozens of live cameras. When traffic is stuck, she’s working even faster.
Over the years, Tucker has seen rush-hour conditions change dramatically. “At 5:30 it used to be backed up from Kunia on a regular basis. Now at 5:30 it’s backed up to North-South (now called Kualakai Parkway) in Kapolei,” she says.
Along with more cars, more construction and the recent weird weather, she thinks lower gas prices have led to commuter problems. “When it was $4.50 a gallon, there were fewer people on the road.”
More than just report current conditions, Tucker has become an advocate for commuters, helping them navigate alternate routes and keep calm. She’ll let the Freeway Service Patrol know if there are stalls, and she’s clearly relieved to hear there are no serious injuries in an accident. When the microphone is off and she’s just watching the cameras, she’s rooting for commuters to get where they want to go.
Her days are split into two shifts, 5 to 8:30 a.m. and then 3:30 until 6 p.m. “The afternoon shift is actually harder because in the morning everyone is heading to the same place. They’re all coming to town,” she says. “In the afternoon people are trying to get to so many different places.”
Continuing a career in Hawaii radio that goes back to the 1980s, Tucker says she’s grateful to be the voice that guides people on their way.
“It’s dynamic. It’s always changing. It’s live radio. I know I’m helping.”
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Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
